Appeal No. 2001-0632
Application No. 08/650,248
matter as a whole would have been obvious to the artisan in view
of the applied references.
In the instant case, while the instant claimed subject
matter appears rather broad in scope, the examiner has simply not
established such a prima facie case of obviousness.
Taking claim 1 as exemplary, the examiner has stated that
Lim teaches a clock distribution with reduced clock skew but
recognizes that Lim fails to disclose the ordering of a scan
chain according to the distribution of the clock signal. The
examiner turns to Meltzer for a teaching of shift register
latches interconnected into scan chains, wherein the shift
register latches are ordered in accordance with the amount of
circuit outputs controlled. While this much appears to be true,
the examiner then concludes that it would have been obvious to
“modify the method of Lim that minimize clock skew, and reduces
the length of clock signal tributaries to include SRL latches as
taught by Meltzer in place of local buffers and ordering the
latches according to the distribution of the clock signal”
[answer-page 4]. The examiner has given absolutely no basis for
substituting SRL latches in place of local buffers in Lim and
then ordering the latches according to the distribution of the
clock signal in Lim. Merely because Lim teaches a clock
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